Saturn's moon Tethys

26 July 2004

Like a half-full Moon, cratered Tethys hangs before the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in this narrow-angle camera view taken on 3 July 2004.

Voyager images showed a large fracture on Tethys about 750 kilometres long (not seen in this view). The Cassini orbiter will investigate this and other features on Tethys during two planned fly-bys, the first occurring on 24 September 2005.

Tethys is 1060 kilometres across. The image was taken in visible light from a distance of 1.7 million kilometres from Tethys. The image scale is 10 kilometres per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a co-operative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.